‘The real danger is not being able to attract the best advocates into the hardest cases’

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Tim Dutton, QC, the new chairman of the Bar, has a real fight on his hands. He explains why the Government is on the wrong track

Mention £1-million-a-year legal aid barristers and Tim Dutton, QC, gets “very angry”. “It’s a thing of the past,” he says. “And what makes me so angry about it is that we have 4,000 barristers doing publicly funded work . . . and the Carter report \ actually discloses that 30 per cent of barristers under three years’ practice are earning less than £10,000 a year on publicly funded work.”

Even the new fees scheme coming into force this month for complex lengthy cases will mean that QCs in middle-tier cases — including some terrorism and murder trials — are paid just £89 an